Reading the law again

Some time ago, The Legal Genealogist was over the moon at the very thought of having free online access to the case reporters held by the Harvard Law School Library.

It was nearly four years ago that Harvard announced that it had partnered with Ravel Law to digitize 40,000 law books, containing 40 million pages, give or take a few, of court decisions that begin with cases that were decided before the Constitution of the United States was even written.1

That project moved forward, slowly as we’d expected — but we all got a bit worried when Ravel Law was acquired by one of the biggest players in the commercial legal research fields, LexisNexis.2

The website reports that, to date, there have been 6.7 million unique state cases scanned, spanning 40 million pages, from 627 reporters — those books published in series with names like New Jersey Law or Arizona Reports and containing the decisions of state-court judges on a wide variety of topics of interest to all historical researchers.4

If that’s not enough, add in roughly 1.7 million federal cases, spanning more than 9.5 million pages from 32 reporters with the decisions of federal court judges as well.5

And what we end up with is free online access to just about all the published court decisions of state and federal trial and appeals courts — and every bit of it word-searchable.

Here’s what the project has to say about itself:

The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library.

CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.

Our scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our earliest case is from 1658, and our most recent cases are from 2018.

Each volume has been converted into structured, case-level data broken out by majority and dissenting opinion, with human-checked metadata for party names, docket number, citation, and date.6

The website allows searching of the entire database with a great deal of precision. Users can search cases, courts, jurisdictions, and reporters. We can enter search terms like names or places in the Full-Text Search field, using basic Boolean “and” search techniques. Using quotes around a search term makes it searchable as a phrase. And we can add fields to refine the search — adding the jurisdiction (what state) or the citation to a case where we know that. There’s a help page that explains the search system.

Or we can browse the cases for a specific place and time. Here, however, we may need to poke around a bit, because what’s listed on the entry page for reading and browsing caselaw may not reflect what’s actually there. As one example, the listing for Arizona Supreme Court cases published in the reporter series Arizona Reports is shown on the entry page as limited to the years 1886-1911. Nope. If you click through, you’ll find every volume through volume 242, and that has cases from 2017.

Users can download cases as well, to read or study offline. Alas, we’re limited to “only” 500 cases a day… “Only” in quotes there since that’s plenty for even this law-geek genealogist — and more than enough for most. If you do need more, you can register as a research scholar and you’d be subject to separate rules.

There’s also some stuff that’s just plain fun. Want to see the distribution of cases mentioning the word “witchcraft”? You can, here. Or how about the most-used words in California cases published each year from 1853 to 2015? Yup. That’s here as well.

Everything on the website is subject to a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0), meaning we’re free to “copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format” and “remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially” as long as we “give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made” and, if we do make changes, distribute the changed version under the same license.7

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5 Comments

Annie Stratton on August 27, 2019 at 10:41 am

Keeper! Old court cases are a dynamic window into the lives of people in the past. I’m thrilled to know this database goes back so far. Thanks for posting this, Judy, and an especial big thanks to Harvard and the people who came up with this idea and made it so accessible. Know what I’m going to spend much of my winter doing!

I had a couple of occasions to lookup court cases of some of my old folks. Twice successfully stumbled on the decisions, once thwarted by Lexis paywall (Me, Pay?). Good to see this even if I may not need it anymore.

Does this mean the end of Lexis or other pay sites? I think not, but no expertise there.

Always greedy, when do we get UK/Irish cases? Doubt Harvard but maybe Oxford (?) will get the hint.

LEXIS (and, for that matter, West, or whatever it is in its present incarnation) “add value” to the raw database of court decisions by indexing them according to subject, with links. And also the shepardizations.

I have done without LEXIS for a while, now that my status as a faculty member has technically come to an end, and with it, my access to LEXIS that was a perquisite to my teaching position. Like all other text media purveyors, LEXIS and its ilk face some challenges in the changing economic dynamic of the internet age.

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